If google sees links as relationships between people/businesses/websites, chances are good relationships correlate well with the extent to which people are linking to each other normally. So, forget about your strategies and your optimally worded link request emails and instead focus on the actual relationship you have with the intended recipient. Offer up advice, comments & ask how they're doing - strike up an actual relationship that you both get something out of, and before long people will be happy to link to you of their own accord.

The majority of my top links haven't come from endless badgering of authorities, sending off email after email requesting links. They've come from generally me being a nice guy and just getting to know people.

Then in my PHP script, $_GET['c'] contains the parent category and $_GET['raw'] contains the rest of the URL. The script then explodes raw into an array with the forward slash as the delimeter. Eventually, with a bit of regular expression work, the script has an array of categories, a product name and a product id.

Then the genius bit:

$product_url = getProductUrl( $product_id ); // works out what the url should be by looping through categories

So, if someone supplies a product id in the url, but the category is wrong, the script will automatically 301 them to the correct location. Also works great if you move products around into different categories, or even start from scratch with new categories. As long as you keep the product ids the same in the database, any links to your old product pages will continue to pass juice and you don't need a million htaccess rules.

It also means I can find something by just substituting the product id in the url instead of searching around the site for it. So it's great for lazy people, too!

Setting up while you're a student is my advice! You can work on your business in your spare time and (in the UK at least) a student loan means you don't have to worry about turning a profit just yet.

As you can see, my business is now doing great, just as I'm about to finish my degree - well enough that deciding to go at it full time is a realistic option. Not bad for a recession.

When I started, I had no idea really where I was going. I had a product I thought I could sell, but none of the skills to sell it. Since then, I've taught myself to program well enough to impliment my idea and the marketing skills (including SEO) to get my ideas seen.

On a similar note, I had a bunch of articles on my sh0p which were getting tonnes of traffic, but converting poorly. I've since set up a separate blog on a similar theme, so to give the blog an initial boost, increase my sh0p conversion rate and garner some fresh interest (read: links), I 301'd all the articles to the blog along with some fresh graphics and updates.